Code at Wrong Level of Abstraction

Jan 25, 2016•
2 min read

design

Let’s abstract this class, let’s play with generics, inherithance, abstract classes and interfaces and make this code reusable in some other context or problem. Oh but wait… this is not quite well placed. Ok, let’s make an exception here or instead add an attribute to configure the behaviour of this particular case. Tadam, it works!

This all so easy to happen and we have to improve our design skills to avoid it and, instead, make code that doesn’t just look cleaner but that is cleaner indeed.

The Clean Code has something to say about it:

It is important to create abstractions that separate higher level general concepts from lower level detailed concepts. Sometimes we do this by creating abstract classes to hold the higher level concepts and derivatives to hold the lower level concepts. When we do this, we need to make sure that the separation is complete. We want all the lower level concepts to be in the derivatives and all the higher level concepts to be in the base class.

For example, constants, variables, or utility functions that pertain only to the detailed implementation should not be present in the base class. The base class should know nothing about them.

This rule also pertains to source files, components, and modules. Good software design requires that we separate concepts at different levels and place them in different containers. Sometimes these containers are base classes or derivatives and sometimes they are source files, modules, or components. Whatever the case may be, the separation needs to be complete. We don’t want lower and higher level concepts mixed together.

The percentFull function is at the wrong level of abstraction. Although there are many implementations of Stack where the concept of fullness is reasonable, there are other implementations that simply could not know how full they are. So the function would be better placed in a derivative interface such as BoundedStack.
Perhaps you are thinking that the implementation could just return zero if the stack were boundless.
The problem with that is that no stack is truly boundless. You cannot really prevent an OutOfMemoryException by checking for

stack.percentFull()<50.0.

Implementing the function to return 0 would be telling a lie. The point is that you cannot lie or fake your way out of a misplaced abstraction. Isolating abstractions is one of the hardest things that software developers do, and there is no quick fix when you get it wrong.